Tilting at windmills

Washington Monthly, May-July, 2008 by Charles Peters

The trial has already led to two suicides: the alleged madam, Deborah Jane Palfrey, who had been sentenced to four to six years in prison; and a former employee, who hanged herself before the trial. The prosecutors will be lucky if there are not more suicides by the women whose lives they have ruined. By the way, none of the prominent male customers, like Senator David Vitter, were required to testify.

Obama: doing it wrong

Last December, Paul Tewes, Obama's Iowa state campaign director, started to give him a detailed briefing on how the campaign was going. Obama waved him off, saying "I trust you and you know what you're doing," according to a June article on Obama's managerial style in the New York Times. Obama may have thought he was showing faith in his staff by not micromanaging. And perhaps his campaign staff is so great that he is justified. But when he starts managing the federal government, he'll find a bureaucracy that is less than uniformly excellent and that is gifted at filtering out the bad news as reports travel up the ladder to the White House. He should follow FDR's example and never miss an opportunity to learn from workers down the line what is really happening with the federal programs for which a president is responsible.

The never-ending story

It is no accident that in the week before the Texas and Ohio primaries, when it appeared that Obama might have the nomination locked up, the press was filled with stories casting doubt on him. Indeed, the same thing happened the week before the Pennsylvania primary. If you want to understand the motivation behind this coverage, one of Billy Wilder's less celebrated masterpieces, Ace in the Hole, explained how a reporter will do anything to keep a good story like the Obama-Clinton contest alive.

In the movie, Kirk Douglas plays the reporter who discovers a miner trapped deep in a mine. Although he knows how to rescue him immediately, he realizes he can milk the poor miner's plight for story after story. So he keeps this knowledge to himself, prolonging the story for weeks, and becoming famous for his breathless Anderson Cooper-like reports from the scene.

Keep those goalposts moving

Another indication of the media's strong unconscious desire to keep the race going: Up until the week before the Pennsylvania primary, the conventional wisdom was that Clinton had to win by a double-digit margin to retain credibility as a candidate. But as election day neared, and polls predicted a single-digit margin, Chris Matthews reduced his estimate to 8 percent; MSNBC's Chuck Todd to 7 percent; and the Washington Post's Dan Balz decided 5 percent would be good enough.

I noticed, however, that the passion to keep the race going seemed to fade after Oregon, and wondered why. Then I had dinner a week or so later with a prominent Washington journalist. He and his wife were scheduled to leave for a European vacation in a few days. Of course, I realized, many Washington reporters and their families have vacations planned for the summer and didn't want to be stuck covering a continuing contest between Clinton and Obama.